More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer

Author:Jim Dwyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was another day for blazer coats and jeans. By early April, dressing up was an established part of their routine for pitches.

Seeing them in these getups was the first clue for Mitch Kapor when the four arrived at his office. After a few preliminaries, Max pulled out his laptop, and began to run through the slides.

“Wait a minute,” Kapor said. “Are you pitching me?”

Indeed they were.

Then they weren’t. Kapor raised a stop sign.

“Why are you showing me your pitch?” Kapor asked.

“We were hoping you’d raise our round for us,” Max said.

“I think I’ve overstepped my bounds here,” Kapor said.

They had come to him because they were floundering, and believed that Kapor’s encouragement over the months meant he was also prepared to put money into the project. After the fiasco at Kleiner Perkins at the beginning of March, the world had not come to an end. The guys continued to make presentations to the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Kapor helped them set up meetings at Greylock, Benchmark, and Google Ventures. They got an e-mail from Andreessen Horowitz inviting them in. Having watched his effort at matchmaking with Kleiner Perkins come to nothing, Yosem connected the guys with Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They also wound up pitching to Floodgate. There were others.

For the most part, the technical people at the firms seemed enthusiastic about Diaspora; it was a pretty clear demonstration that Facebook, for all its polish and smoothness of operations, did not have any digital secret sauce that it alone was able to make. What they had, of course, was scale. But even Facebook had elements of uncertainty in its business model; its ability to bring in operating revenue, as opposed to equity investors, was at that point uncertain. Regardless, the scale of its expenses was without precedent. It held the world’s largest cache of photographs, and had internal standards that pictures and other elements of an individual’s page—the likes, the updates, the links—be loaded at what was lightning speed. These qualities were what made the network attractive, sleek, and fleet, and thus would help bring ever more people into the Facebook corral. The basic asset of the personal data of hundreds of millions of people throbbed with intriguing commercial possibilities. Still, online advertising had a short history, making reliance on it to unlock future streams of revenue less a matter of experience and more based on faith, hope, and awe in an entity that could consistently gather so many of the planet’s humans in one virtual space.

The Diaspora project also had difficulties articulating precisely how it was going to turn its relatively infinitesimal number of subscribers into money. Federation inherently meant that every user, in theory, was sovereign. The traditional stream of income from ads was unlikely if tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of individuals were masters of their Diaspora domain. As the spring advanced, they began to skin back the funding they were seeking. The $10 million ask that had choked off the Kleiner Perkins presentation was removed from the slide show.

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